Hana Bicencová

“I remember that we were in Prague on a cultural trip from fishermens club, it was for the whole day. In the morning we took the bus, all day we were enjoying our hobbies and in the evening we had tickets for vaudeville. It was in a passage, I don't know exactly where.” “Was it at the weekend?” “No, I think it was Friday. Just before the culmination of that revolution. And I was with my husband at the grocery house opposite the statue of St. Wenceslas leaning sideways against the wall of the grocery house. A crowd of people went up from Můstek, as I see it today, a crowd of people approaching from the Bridge. Above the statue of St. Wenceslas a row of white helmets, the cops with batons in their hands were standing in that row, we were stuck with our backs at the wall and we did not know what was going to happen. We didn't know about the various protests, that they sprayed them with water and alike, when it was Palach's week and so on. We did not know the details about it, it was not on the public news. So we saw the crowd approaching up, those white helmets running down against them. It was cruel. Terrible disappointment for us. Of course, there was no program in the evening and then we went home when we met. Everyone had a heart in their throats because seeing it with their own eyes was something terrible we didn't know that from television, we didn't know that this was happening.”

“When we wrote the stories of the daughters of political prisoners in the 1950s and engineer Zuzana Vittvarová asked me, 'Hanička, tell me, what was the most difficult thing for you at the time?' So I went through many terms and situations. And finally I came to the fact that the worst was losing home. Losing home is terrible. Later, when I was in disability, I created our family tree. Our family was there three hundred years back, the family was rooted there. Relationship to the past, it was grown in the family, from grandpa to son and children. We all had to get involved in work. It was just that.”

“Sometimes I got permission to visit. It was very traumatizing because I went from Prague to Dolní Žďár at 7:30 pm. We got there at about four o'clock in the morning, and these were always the relatives who used to visit family members. And I remember there was such a wooden elongated shack. A bus with the prisoners arrived. Then they called us in, not that we were sitting at the table inside. There was a wall, wooden at the bottom, glass at the top, with a hole of about 20 cm in diameter at the height of the mouth. That way we could talk. I usually had tears in my eyes. We couldn't even touch our hands. Dad said, 'Learn, be good, obey.' What else could he tell me? There was a guard, a dog, a guard, a dog, a prisoner, a guard, a dog, a prisoner, always about five, six in the line. I can´t recall it anymore today. And it took a quarter of an hour. And the end of visits. We changed again and we could go home. We moved again and took a train back. Though we saw each other, the trauma was heavy, way too heavy. And my brother was young, and if you think there were 15 years ahead of him, not in sight at that time. And then I remember it was October 28th, the proclamation of the Republic, and we were patriotically brought up from home. My brother then said that him or one of his friends had painted a Czechoslovak flag and put it on the wall, and Jenda was punished for that to go to Leopoldov. That was such a fortress that I know from later documents. We were never allowed to see him, never, we had never been to Leopold all year long. It was only when he returned to Jáchymov from the punishment that he returned to the uranium works.”

“It was Thursday, May 12, 1960, and my brother returned from Jáchymov for parole. It was joyful and sad too; a difficult time. Because my dad, he hated the communists, hated them and criticized them. I remember that my father and brother Jenda were sitting on a bench in the garden, certainly discussing Jáchymov, the two of them together, all the years they had lived there, the people they met and knew there, and there were various wonderful personalities. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday there was a pilgrimage in Stříbřec; there is a church dedicated to St. John of Nepomuk. I was in a high degree of pregnancy, I was expecting Eva and I was in church with my dad. My mother was at home, she was cooking, daughter Hanička was at home and there was also my sister with her family. It was a festive fair day. Now when I look back at it, I see it rather sadly. It was more of a farewell day, to say goodbye, that is how I see it today. Because on Monday morning, May 16, 1960, it was about 6 o'clock, my mother came and said, 'Children, something happened, something happened!' We didn't know what happened. Daddy took his life. My dad took his life because he knew he wouldn't keep himself from criticizing the communists, he knew it. Jenda, my brother, when we talked about it, he remembered how he said to him: 'Dad, please don't say it, leave it alone, you know they're watching us, and I don't want to go there anymore, I don't want to go there anymore. 'And daddy, in order to prevent it, otherwise he was as healthy as a beep, our daddy made this step, but I know they have driven a lot of people to suicide at that time. So we went through this difficult time.”